The final take on the disastrous Mar-a-Lago raid and its noxious aftermath – the latest in a series of “killing blows” aimed at Donald Trump and the movement he created -- is that Trump must run once again for president and must win. The logic behind this is simple: the Deep State, in its slow, dull-witted, and utterly inept way, is making its big move, and Trump is the only visible figure who can stand against this. The Left is well aware of this, and is terrified.

Consider the timeline: on August 7, the Senate passed the “Inflation Reduction Act,” dramatically expanding government spending, including doubling the size of the IRS. The next day, Mar-a-Lago was raided, permanently rupturing the modus vivendi that has underlain the American political system since its founding. Two days later, it was revealed that the drastically expanded IRS was looking to hire gunmen “willing to use lethal force.” Two days after that, the inflation act was passed by the House.

In due time, we got Biden’s Demon Lord speech, which cast more than half the populace as enemies of the state, to the delight of the hard Left, followed by Countess Hochula, speaking from her castle deep in the Adirondacks banning Republicans from her realm.

Since then, we’ve seen dozens of Trump attorney, aides, and even mere supporters arrested, subpoenaed, and otherwise harassed by an out-of-control Justice Department. The depth here was probably reached with the ensnarement of enemy of the people Mike Lindell by three carloads of FBI agents at a Hardee’s drive-in. (Why no chopper gunships? I assume they were down for maintenance.)

This progression of events is no accident, comrades. Things like this don’t “just happen” – they are made to happen. It clearly demonstrates that the woke elite intends to take things to another level, challenging its opponents – which is to say, the American people -- directly. How far this will go, whether to open police action or 2020-style targeting by Antifa and related elements, is impossible to say. But one thing we can take for granted is that this represents, at the very least, an intention, and that the Left will attempt as much as it can get away with.

The progressive elite has cut itself off from the mainspring of American political life as thoroughly as the Confederates did in 1861. Though, following Hegel’s dictum, this time it’s farce. It all immediately began falling to pieces – the raid itself, obviously meant to mark the beginning of a political purge, blew up in the faces of the DoJ and FBI, Donald Trump got a much-needed second wind, and the MAGA masses are now energized to a point unseen since the Big Cheat. Clearly, this generation of swamp dwellers is incapable of carrying out any exercise of greater complexity than tying their shoes.

But why now, you ask? It’s not that they particularly think that this is the right time – it’s simply the logic of events. All the errors and crimes they’ve committed in the past decade are pushing them inexorably to the next step, and then the one after that. So, as in the case of the raid itself, they make their moves without adequate preparation, without careful planning, and without guarantees. The result is the half-crazed acts of desperation we’re seeing right now.

The response to the raid ranged from incredulity and disgust from the voting public to a kind of mollusk-like belching from the current GOP leadership. Evidently, there is somebody named “DeSantis,” who is, believe it or not, the governor of Florida, where Mar-a-Lago is located. The DoJ, in defiance of law, tradition, and common sense, set out to persecute an innocent man living in Florida, which DeSantis purports to govern. He could have answered this in tones of thunder, demanding to know what the Hell they thought they were doing in his state. He could have ordered the local SAC (special agent in charge) to appear at his office, and when he didn’t show up, drove over to his office escorted by State Police and plenty of media, to publicly humiliate him. He could even have shut the office down and ordered the staff out of state, as used to occur with regularity in my hometown when I was a kid (granted, it was the Mob-controlled police force that was doing this in Utica, but the principle is sound).

But he didn’t do any of this. No, he released a “statement,” which I’m not going to bother to look up – reading it once was enough. But it went something like, “That wasn’t very nice… maybe you shouldn’t do things like that.”

So much for the young GOP lion. Martha’s Vineyard stunts are one thing, standing up when it counts is something else altogether.

This puts DeSantis in the same class as Kristi Noem and Scott Walker. We all recall Noem bending to the transgenders, while Walker’s career evaporated when he adapted the RINO stance toward illegals under pressure from GOP donors. DeSantis is likely to recover better than these two, but he is clearly not yet ready for national office.

We’ll simply add that this is the man who has been widely proposed as a “replacement” for Trump.

And who else is there? Mike Pence? Like, no, man. Portman? Eisenhower? No… he’s dead. The answer is simple. We look across the political landscape and we see nobody. In the end it’s not a choice between Trump and some loyal GOPe lapdog – it’s a choice between Trump and nothing.

The point is that, politically, the U.S. is in a state of limbo. There’s plenty of activity, lots of shouting, lots of arm-waving and chest beating, but it’s all theater. It’s meaningless, signifying nothing, and nobody takes it seriously. The ghost currently inhabiting the White House shuffles uselessly from one curated event to another. People like Hochul and Newsom issue impossible decrees and absurd proposals, and nothing happens. Useless trash like Whitmer and (once again) Newsom are proposed as presidential material, and nobody so much as shrugs. The lefties dare each other to go for the Bolshie brass ring and the Republicans, as ever, embrace their inner wimp (there’s always a wimp factor with the GOP) – each pretending to dominate the political landscape. Both are failing, because nothing they do matters.

There is a single individual who does matter, just as there was one such figure in 50 B.C. Rome, and one such figure in 1950s France. Everything that occurs takes place in his shadow. The media rants about him ceaselessly. Officials and politicians shout and shake fists. A full congressional committee spends months sitting in judgment on him, looking dumber and more pointless every day. All of it only emphasizes their impotence and underlines their clownishness. No wonder they want to get rid of him.

Every last weapon available to the elites, the Swamp, and the Democrats, including the media, the Intelligence Community, the military, the bureaucracy, and both houses of Congress have been turned against Donald Trump, and the result has been minimal.

Eight out of ten Trump endorsees won their primaries (and it would have been nine if it hadn’t been for conservatives pulling their customary circus tricks, running half a dozen candidates for a single seat.) Both GOP turncoats who planned on riding an anti-Trump wave to higher office have seen their careers crash and burn. Glenn Youngkin ran as a Trump-style populist, turning deep blue Virginia inside out.  A national uprising against woke school boards based on Trump principles of action has set the corrupt educational establishment tottering.

Yet despite all this, the major topic of conversation on the right is how quickly he can be written off.

It’s all beside the point, really, because Trump has to run. If he were somehow persuaded to step down, it would be a political catastrophe for the GOP that it would likely never recover from, an act of surrender and impotence for which no historical parallels come to mind. The MAGA movement would be broken, the GOP emptied of any meaningful support. The Left would be frenzied by its victory -- absolutely nothing would stand between them and the totalitarian control they’ve lusted after since the 1930s.

The cemeteries may be full of indispensable men, but Donald Trump is not in a cemetery yet. The major challenge of the first half of the 21^st century is not the economy, public morality, the border, or anything else – it’s the destruction of the American Left. No other president – not even Reagan – has done more damage to the Left. The GOPe loathes Trump because he threatens the status quo. The Left hates him because he threatens their very existence.  

There’s a commonplace storyline to be found repeated across the ages. It’s a version of the Little Tailor that is present in the Aenied, Red Harvest, Yojimbo, A Fistful of Dollars. A man appears to clean up a bad town. He works cleverly against seemingly unbeatable enemies, until, waking up at last to the threat he represents, they get the drop on him, beat him to a pulp, and dump him out in the brush.

So what does he do? He gets up, he brushes himself off, and he goes back, tougher and wiser, and brings the whole rotten structure down.

Simply put, this tells us the major reason why Donald Trump needs to run again – because that rotten town is still standing, and ripe to be taken down.

Image: Gage Skidmore